Steve Gunn: Prison offers unique opportunity to solve county problem

Steve GunnOne day about five or six years ago during my time as a reporter, I stopped by the Muskegon County Sheriff’s Department to check police reports.

The shift officer started bugging me to do what he always wanted me to do — take a tour of the county jail. I had turned him down a half dozen times before, mostly because I didn’t have the time and I wasn’t particularly interested.

But on this occasion I decided to get him off my back and take the 30 minutes necessary to follow him around the building.

I quickly understood why he wanted everyone in the media to get a good look at what passes for a jail in our community. It was sickening. He took me down hallway after hallway of overcrowded, moldy, stinky cells. It was like something you would see on cable television, when those ghost-hunting shows visit prisons that have been abandoned for 50 years.

Our jail should have been abandoned at least 20 years ago.

It seemed as though that might happen three or four years ago, when county commissioners decided to ask the voters to approve a millage to construct a new jail. If I remember correctly, the new structure would have been built off the current one, eliminating a section of Walton Street between Pine and Terrace. The old juvenile detention facility in Whitehall Township would have been replaced as well.

The commissioners set several tentative dates for a millage election, appointed a committee to sell the public on the idea, and started considering building designs.

But they never were able to pull the trigger, probably with good reason. The economy was in very bad shape and nobody was in the mood for increased property taxes. There’s no doubt the millage request would have crashed and burned.

But the pressing need for a new jail has not gone away. That’s why I was happy to hear that the county is thinking about adopting the current Muskegon Correctional Facility as the new county jail. I’m not sure what it would take to get this done, but I believe it’s a very good idea, for a lot of different reasons.

The first is obviously the overcrowding situation at the current jail. For years local judges have been forced to release thousands of inmates early, due to a lack of space. That makes a joke out of our local judicial system.

Several court officials have told me that local lawbreakers are not afraid of conviction and a jail sentence in Muskegon County, because they know there’s a good chance they will be going home early. They have little or no respect for a court system that lacks the facilities to carry out its sentences.

Some local politicians have long argued that our judges send too many people to jail for minor offenses, adding to the overcrowding problem. There may be something to that argument. We should develop more alternative sentencing programs for nonviolent offenders.

But it’s better to have more than enough room for truly dangerous people, rather than the other way around. And we have to make sure there’s always enough space to force people to serve their entire sentences. That would likely be the case if we used the correctional facility.

I also like the idea of having a more modern facility where jail staff would not have to come into constant contact with inmates. Our jail guards have been assaulted over the years, several seriously, because they have to lead inmates back and forth to court in the adjacent Hall of Justice.

In most prisons (including, I assume, the correctional facility), cell doors open and close by the push of a remote button, so inmates can be moved about without any direct contact with staff.

There’s also a need to keep more violent criminals separated from lesser offenders, and keeping members of rival gangs apart. That’s just not possible in the current jail, where elbow room is nonexistent.

Citizen safety is an obvious concern. In my reporter days working at the Hall of Justice, I used to cringe at the constant site of shackled prisoners being led down crowded hallways full of citizens, coming from or going to court. The public should not be exposed to that potential danger, and frankly, I don’t think we should have to look at these folks either.

Video hearings and arraignments, conducted from the distant confines of the correctional facility, would take care of most of that problem.

More than anything, I think changing our jail arrangement should be a matter of pride for the community.

Visiting officials must be mortified at the condition of our facility and its central location. Our downtown area is slowly coming back and has a lot of potential. We should remove the obvious black eye on Walton Street and use the old jail space for better purposes, as soon as possible.

There’s also the matter of decent treatment of our local inmates. I’m the last person who would suggest coddling criminals, but as County Commissioner James Derezinski once said, our current jail is a hellhole. Making sure our prisoners are kept in humane conditions says something about our basic decency as a community.

The fact is that the old correctional facility will soon be available, when the state of Pennsylvania stops renting space for its overflow inmates. Muskegon County officials should arrange to have access to at least part of it, before the state finds another taker.

The cost may be high, but there may never be a better alternative. It certainly would not cost as much as building a new facility, and I doubt whether county voters are any more likely to approve a millage than they were a few years ago.

This is a unique opportunity to address a frustrating local problem. I hope our elected officials can get it done.